Thr proposed research is focused primarily on the identification and manipulation of conditions affecting the development and perseveration of self-punitive behavior. Special attention will be paid to the contributions of conditioned fear and to the relative viability of alternative interpretations stressing discriminative (cognitive) processes and stimulus similarity. Traditional methods will be applied to the study of such variables as pre-exposure to conditioned stimuli, alcohol, opportunities for fear to become associatively connected to locomotion, the strength of the association between fear-produced cues and locomotion, and the relative effects of post-response shock-free goal-box exposure and pre-response start-box exposure. A second major area of interest is that of avoidance conditioning which is conceptually tied to self-punitive behavior through a common mechanism of secondary fear motivation. A random-shock procedure will be followed and the durations of post-response shock-free intervals will be varied along with changes in degree of regularity of shocks. Moreover, special procedures designed to accelerate the post-response decay in shock- induced primary emotionality will be introduced and the effects of "informative" and "signalling" response-contingent stimuli will be studied.